Mirtha Verde Ramo and Guillermo Valenzuela are the co-directors of the Escuela St. Germain, a holistic, non-profit institute in Santiago, Chile. I was introduced to them in 2008 in Mt. Shasta by the mystic Lois J. Crawford. Lois had studied since she was nine years old with Guy and Edna Ballard, the founders of the I Am movement that began in the late1930’s. I found Lois through her website and she and her husband Allan invited me to come to Mt. Shasta to meet with them and the Chileans. I described our initial meeting in Chapter 15 of Tennis With God.
Since then, Lois and her husband Allan have passed away, but my adventures with the Chileans have continued. And our friendships have deepened. Guillermo is an English instructor at a university and he is a wonderful translator. I have been working to improve my rusty Spanish from one year of school long ago in Bogota, Colombia at Colegio Nueva Granada.
During my time with the Chileans, I learned a few natural healing techniques from Mirtha such as chakra and aura cleansing. I also traveled with them and groups of their students to various temples and spiritual places in New York City in 2017 and 2024. Each location and venue has its own special vibe. We were often hot, tired and enthralled at the same time. And get this…we stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant near the large Buddhist temple on the south end of Manhattan, and after our waiter heard our group speaking Spanish, he burst into serenading us in perfect Spanish with the song Besame Mucho. Everyone was delighted and the Chileans enthusiastically joined in the singing. It turns out he had once lived in Chile, of all the coincidences!
Mirtha has boundless energy and follows her intuition even if it means changing plans in any given moment. I could barely keep up with her as our group of 14 (including two toddlers!) traversed NYC on foot, bus, taxi, and subway during the stifling heat and humidity of July for six days in a row. Hey, I love saunas and sweat lodges, but these were not mere tourist trips for the faint of heart or foot.
But while I generally love the heat, hot yoga is clearly above my capabilities. I believe you will howl with laughter in the sequel Tennis With God II during the chapter called Hot Yoga Roadkill. In my first attempt at hot yoga, I learned the hard way that sometimes you are the bug, and sometimes you are the windshield. It was clearly not my finest moment and I was woefully unprepared.
In 2021, I hosted ten members of the group from Chile when they visited Mt. Shasta during the height of the COVID crisis and raging forest fires in California. There goes Mirtha, following her intuition again, but we were off and running and we lined up a day with Andrew Oser, a retreat guide from Mt. Shasta who had private access to a special place we could go to on the mountain while it was closed to everyone else. I had found Andrew on the internet when I learned he had also written books about tennis using a spiritual approach. For his many years of coaching youth players, he was named by President George Bush as one of the Thousand Points of Light. All of these adventures and fortuitous synchronicities will be included in the sequel Tennis With God II. This photo is of Mirtha giving a blessing to me in the Cathedral of St. John in New York City.
Escuela St. Germain web site:
Andrew Oser web site: